Marc Maibom — La Profilée | The Structural Law of Determinate Reality
La Profilée originated in the architecture of a watch.
What began as a question of design revealed a much more fundamental order: how can something change without ceasing to be what it is?
The answer was not found in a particular material, mechanism, or technology. It lay in the structural relationship between what constitutes a whole, what can differ within it, and what decides which differences it can take up.
Frame. Module. Coupling.
These are the three fundamental structural roles: what holds a whole the same, what can differ within it, and what decides which differences it can take up without ceasing to be itself.
The discovery led beyond the watch.
The same structural questions arise wherever something exists as a determinate whole — in physical systems, chemical structures, living organisms, cognition, and the relationships through which distinct systems form larger wholes.
La Profilée identifies three inseparable dimensions of this order:
Constitution — What makes something a determinate whole?
Transformation — What makes it remain the same through real change?
Coexistence — What allows distinct wholes to constitute a common relational order?
The resulting work, The Structural Law of Determinate Reality, develops the formal foundations and consequences of this structural law. Its research extends into quantum mechanics, general relativity, quantum gravity, chemistry, biology, cognition, and consciousness.
The physics programme investigates how the structural law is realized in physical systems, including the common constitution and continuation of quantum matter and dynamical spacetime.
La Profilée also returns to its constructive origin. Through natural-system architecture, design and be[com]ing, the discovered structural order becomes a basis for creating, analyzing, and transforming systems without losing the conditions that make them what they are.
La Profilée was noticed in design and derived from necessity: nothing in the derivation rests on the watch. Its subject is the structural order of determinate reality.
